Down in a near-by market is a little florist’s shop, so small that one might pass twenty times without noticing it; the man, a local authority, who has kept it for years, makes a specialty of the great long-stemmed single violets, whose fleeting fragrance no words may express.  They call them Californias now, but they are evidently the opulent kin of those sturdy, dark-eyed Russian violets of my mother’s garden, and as they mean more than any other flower to me, Evan always brings them to me when I come to town.  This morning he trudged out in the snow, hardly thinking this man would have any, but by mere chance the grower, suspecting snow, brought in his crop the night before, and in spite of the storm I had the first morning breath of these flowers of a day.

Miss Lavinia sniffed and sighed, and then buried her aristocratic, but rather chilly, nose in the mass.  “I feel like a young girl with her first bouquet,” she said presently.

“Ah, how good it is to be given something with a meaning.  Most people think that to be able to buy what they wish, within reason, is perfect happiness, but it isn’t.  Barbara, you and this man of yours quite unsettle me and shake my pet theories.  You show sides of things in my own birthplace that I never dreamed of looking up, and you convince me, when I am on the wane, that married friendship is the only thing worth living for.  It’s too bad of you, but fortunately for me the notion passes off after you have gone away,” and Miss Lavinia, after loving her violets a bit longer, put them in a chubby jug of richly chased old silver.  After breakfast we tried to coax her to bundle up and come with us to Washington Square to see the crystal trees in all their beauty; but that was too unorthodox a feat.  To plough through snow in rubber boots in the very heart of the city was entirely too radical a move.  She knew people about the square, and I suppose did not wish to be seen by them, so she was obliged to content herself with sight of the snow draperies and ice jewels that decked the trees and shrubs of the doomed back yard.

Even though the storm called a halt in our plans for Miss Lavinia, Evan and I had a little errand of our own, our annual pilgrimage to see the auction room where we first met that February afternoon.  The room is not there now, to be sure, but we go to see it all the same, and have our little thrill and buy something near the place to take home to the boys, and we shall continue to come each year unless public improvement causes the thoroughfare itself to be hung up in the sky, which is quite possible.

Then Evan went down town, and I returned to lunch with Miss Lavinia, for, if possible, we were to call on Sylvia Latham and ask her to dinner on the morrow, the last day of our stay.  Miss Lavinia proposed to invite Sylvia to spend the night also, that we might become acquainted upon a basis less formal than a mere dinner.